Rip Rip, its Digital Baby

It’s almost complete; I’ve been working on converting my entire music collection to digital audio and with almost 300 albums it is no trivial task. I’ve been thinking about it ever since I modded my X-Box and have finally gotten around to starting it 2 weeks ago.Heather is the one, who actually brought it up this time, she has an MP3/CD radio in her car and I guess was getting tired of listening to the same songs all the time. We had a gift card for Best Buy which we used to get a 120GB disk for the new media library.For listening to the MP3’s on the home theatre we are using X-Box Media Center on my modded X-Box. It is a great application and functions excellently for this application, and there is no additional investment that I have to make.For the ripping and encoding I used CDex which is a great program, it’s open source, it can encode in many formats, it names the files and the ID3 tags from the CDDB.Before I started I had to decide what format I wanted to encode the files with, either MP3 or OGG. The OGG format has a lot of benefits over MP3. OGG was developed to be an open format where MP3 is patent encumbered, this means that anyone who wants to make a MP3 player pays royalties, and there is no cost to make an OGG player. OGG sounds better than MP3 when files are encoded at the same bit rate for most types of music. The only aspect in which MP3 leads is market share, since it’s so popular most media players support MP3 where few currently support OGG. I didn’t want to paint myself into a corner and have a limited choice of media players when I get one, so I had to choose MP3 as the format for the files.The next thing to decide was the quality to encode the MP3’s at. You can encode at a constant bit rate (CBR) with settings like 128, 160, and 192 kbps or use a variable bit rate (VBR) where the encoded adjusts how much bandwidth is needed for a particular part of the song. After doing some research I found that LAME (Lame Aint an Mp3 Encoder) has some optimal preset settings and I chose the setting –alt-preset-standard. This uses VBR for the file but tries to keep the over all size to that of a 192kbps file.For playback I’m going to use X-box Media Center on my home theatre. It’s a great program that meets all my needs in that room and I have no additional cost involved.I’d love to find a portable wi-fi mp3 radio, something that would resemble a clock radio that I could easily move to the room where I want music, but I haven’t been able to find any products like that. I did find Sonos which has an awesome product that they are working on, that is an awesome whole house solution, but it’s a little out of my budget.Eventually I plan to get a portable MP3 player for when I’m in the car or out. My favorite currently is the iRiver H120. From what I’ve read people like it better than the iPod and it boasts better battery life along with some other sweet features.When I’m out-out I can access my mp3 collection via FTP over my home broadband connection, so If I have the bandwidth I can download my music from anywhere. (hint hint, email me).In all it has been great; I’ve been listening to CD’s that I haven’t dusted off in 10 years. Now I just need that portable mp3 player, donations anyone?